Marius Sperlich (German, b. 1991) is a Berlin-based photographer known for extreme close-up images of the human body, styled with props and staged in high-gloss, saturated color.,Working like a director, he plans each photograph around a storyline or feeling, then builds and dismantles physical sets by hand rather than using digital editing.,
Sperlich grew up in the suburbs of Hamburg, Germany, where skateboarding and the graphic style of skate videos and magazines shaped his visual sense from an early age. He describes his aesthetic as “anonymous intimacy”, and works closely with make-up artist Joanna Bacas to build each scene, insisting that what appears in a photograph is physically real rather than added afterward in Photoshop. Through humour and glossy, advertising-style color, his images have addressed subjects such as the censorship of female nipples on social media and climate change.
In 2018 Sperlich styled and photographed Playboy's winter 2019 cover, the magazine's first artistic cover commission in nineteen years, and has also produced work for fashion brands including Dior.,As part of his series Modern Drugs, shown at Context Art Miami, he presented Likes=Money, an interactive portrait whose price rose with the number of likes it received on Instagram, passing $100,000 as it drew around 110,000 likes.He released his first NFT drop on Nifty Gateway in March 2021, casting Bitcoin as a drug in keeping with his provocative visual language.,He has shown in gallery exhibitions in Berlin, Miami, New York and São Paulo, and has sold his print editions directly to collectors through timed drops rather than gallery representation alone.,
